Faith Is Not Evidence

By Cliff Potts
Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

There is a kind of honesty that only arrives late. It comes after the slogans have worn thin, after grief has piled up without resolving into wisdom, after illness rearranges consciousness and strips away the stories that once made things bearable. It is not dramatic. It does not shout. It simply refuses to pretend anymore.

Across a lifetime, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. People disappear and do not return. Institutions harm and do not repent. Prayers go unanswered in ways that cannot be explained away as timing or mystery. History repeats its cruelties with new uniforms and updated language. And heaven, if it is there, remains silent.

Standing in that wreckage, some people rush to rebuild. They assemble new certainties, softer doctrines, therapeutic faiths that promise meaning if not justice. Others double down, insisting the failure lies in the observer: insufficient belief, insufficient humility, insufficient obedience. But there is another option, quieter and less flattering. One can stand still and admit what is actually visible.

This is where the old biblical phrase becomes revealing: faith is the substance of things not seen. It is usually offered as comfort. In practice, it is an admission.

Belief in a single, all-powerful, benevolent God requires faith precisely because that reality does not present itself clearly in the world as it exists. Not occasionally. Consistently.

When one looks honestly at history, the pattern is not redemption but endurance. Suffering is not rare or corrective; it is routine. Innocence offers no protection. Moral behavior does not reliably produce better outcomes. Entire generations carry grief that is never resolved, only managed. If there is a divine moral order actively governing events, it does not announce itself in results.

Human testimony about God does not clarify this picture. It fragments it. Every culture describes God differently. Every era reshapes Him to match its fears and ambitions. Religious institutions contradict one another while claiming exclusive truth. Sacred texts are interpreted, revised, weaponized, and selectively ignored. Appeals to divine will often track neatly with human self-interest.

None of this proves that God does not exist. But it does explain why belief is not self-evident.

If God exists as traditionally described — singular, omnipotent, covenant-keeping — that reality is not observable in outcomes. It is asserted in texts. Preserved in rituals. Passed along through trust, habit, and inheritance. Faith does not rest on evidence reinforced by experience; it survives in the absence of it.

This is not an attack on faith. It is an accounting of what faith actually is.

Faith is not strengthened by watching the world work as promised. It persists when the promises fail to materialize. It does not grow because suffering makes sense, but because one chooses to continue believing despite the fact that it does not. That choice may be admirable. It may be necessary for some. But it should not be confused with certainty.

Religious confidence often erodes with age for a reason. Decades accumulate losses that cannot be spiritualized. Grief teaches arithmetic, not allegory. Illness alters consciousness in ways sermons never address. Over time, lived experience stops cooperating with doctrine, and belief must either harden or quiet down.

What remains, if one is honest, is not moral superiority or clarity. It is endurance without proof. A willingness to hold tension without resolution. Or, for some, a decision to stop pretending that faith explains what it never actually addressed.

The phrase was never a promise. It was a warning. Faith exists because the evidence does not. And that tension does not go away just because we wish it would.